Wearing green isn’t the only thing keeping you from being involved in a vehicle wreck this St. Patrick’s Day, as the Iowa departments of public safety and transportation as well as other organizations across the state hold the first of four traffic enforcement waves to help reduce traffic fatalities in 2021.

Iowa State Patrol District 13 Public Resource Officer Jason Marlowe says March 17th is typically one of the biggest drinking nights of the year in Iowa, and in 2019 there were two crashes over the holiday that killed four people. Marlowe says the Traffic Fatality Task Force was formed by the Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau, the Iowa DOT, and ISP this year to implement educational, enforcement, and legislative initiatives to help the state achieve a target of less than 300 traffic fatalities annually, “That 300 number is one that we’ve tried to use for a long time to get below. Clearly, we understand as well as your listeners that one traffic fatality is one too many, especially if it directly involves someone that you know. So really we start at the local level, what can I do to make sure that I’m safe when I’m driving? That my family’s safe, that as I travel in and around the roadways of Washington County that we do everything we can to prevent something happening from that nature.”

Marlowe says another focus of the March 17th enforcement wave is seatbelt usage, as half of Iowa’s 40 traffic fatalities that have occurred so far this year involved those not wearing a seatbelt.